preserved_ginger

Title: A Wind Just Passing Through
Character(s): Ten. Rose mentioned passim, other characters also mentioned
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose
Rating: PG
Beta: the ever-faithful

requialexa
Setting: post-Voyage of the Damned
Spoilers: From The Parting of the Ways, through everything, to Voyage of the Damned.
Disclaimer: Borrowed, sans permission.
A/N: This fic made me cry to write, so it comes with a tissue-warning. It was written for

adonde_fui as part of the

time_and_chips Secret Pilotfish Exchange.

adonde_fui asked for Fic-ten/rose, your choice, so I hope this cuts the mustard! The title comes from the Runrig song The Dancing Floor. All italicised dialogue is from the episodes.
Summary: He tries not to see everyone through a Rose-shaped prism, but it's a losing battle.

“Have a good life. Do that for me, Rose. Have a fantastic life.”

You hadn’t put any thought into how Rose would feel when she saw you appear as if from nowhere on that cold Norwegian beach, how it would bring back for her an unloved, unwanted memory: Emergency Programme One and the nightmare of the Daleks, the Game Station, and the loss of Jack (who she thinks she will never see again; she won’t, but not for the reason she thinks).

“And I'm not gonna see you again. Not like this. Not with this daft old face.”

Is that the way, you wonder, that you came through that horrendous afternoon? A thin and insubstantial hologram, a flickering, haunting image in a thousand different shades of blue? You don’t know, and never will; all you can do is hope she saw all of you as you saw all of her - that wonderful, fantastic woman who had been your only thought through a regeneration of fire and pain.

“I was dying. To save my own life I changed my body. Every single cell, but... it's still me.”

You hadn’t put any thought into the potential consequences at all, really, because to you they hadn‘t mattered. Nothing had mattered, nothing at all except that raw and desperate need to see her face again that one last time. To assuage the crushing pain and guilt just a tiny little bit by at last verbalising what you felt for her and allowing her the chance to do the same. In doing so, you would finally have made it real … but you messed it up, that one time it really mattered. And now you have to live with that knowledge - that she doesn't know, won't ever know, for certain how much you feel for her.

“If it’s my last chance to say it … Rose Tyler …”

You have worked it out, now, or at least you think you have. Everything and everyone you care for, everyone you’ve loved, (Rose. Susan. Romana. Jack. Countless others) have left you in one way or the other, and now you think you are cursed to wander the universe alone for ever. Sometimes it seems to you that you must be marked, or something; it would explain why even someone you’ve only known for a few hours, someone that can’t possibly know all the things you’re capable of, is scared enough of what could lie in store that they won’t travel with you.

“Her name was Rose.”

Of course, when you do find a new companion - Martha Jones - you realise that you’re not in a fit state, emotionally, to deal with her. Asking her to travel with you was a mistake and it rebounds, painfully, on both of you. And when she compounds that mistake by falling in love with you, that just makes a bad situation worse. She isn’t Rose, she cannot hope to be to you what Rose was, so she’s on a hiding to nothing and there is nothing you can do to help her.

“Rose would know. That friend of mine, Rose. Right now she’d say exactly the right thing.”

And then there’s Jack. The impossible made fact. You know that you have treated him abominably but he is everything your Time Lord training taught you to fear: a fixed point in time and space. He asks about Rose, of course - he would have known about the disaster that was Canary Wharf; living in the UK, you couldn’t possibly not have heard about it - and you cannot bear to tell him the truth. Yet despite everything you did to him, he proves yet again how loyal a friend and ally he is. You would never have survived the Year that Never Was without his mental strength to support you. He won’t travel with you, either, at the end of it all but that is nothing more than you deserve.

“She’s gone, Jack. She’s not just living on a parallel world, she’s trapped there. The walls have closed.”

It seems to you sometimes that, wherever you go and whatever you do, nothing ever happens except death and destruction; after your latest adventure, where you lost Astrid to stardust, it is possible that you are finally learning that you cannot make attachments to anyone or anything. For you, to do so is just tempting fate. What was it you said when trying to bring Astrid back into a solid corporeal form?

“I can do anything.”

Oh, if only that were true.

And so, now, you travel alone; there are plenty of folk out there who would willingly go with you if they were only asked, but the one you want - the only one you ever wanted to hold your hand - is gone, and you’ve no interest in anyone else. You are tired, and lonely, and every day without her is a waking nightmare, but you hide it all behind a façade of mind-numbing cheerfulness and carry on regardless. For there is nothing else you can do.

But as you begin the TARDIS dematerialisation sequence, off to Chaos knows where, your thoughts fly as they so often seem to do these days to the Rose who now blooms in an only half-familiar soil. And the one thing you can think of is what you had once thought would be the last words of yours she would ever hear. Oddly enough, they still fit, even with your rudeness and the teeth which you are still not used to:

“Have a good life. Do that for me, Rose. Have a fantastic life.”